Checking out a copy of each branch of the contributions repository

In the old release system, a lot of people had a checkouts directory, similar to this:

Each branch of the contributions repository had its own folder, so you could track new modules and changes to existing modules for each major Drupal version in one place.

You now need to track a few more branches:

which would give you:

Note that branch names for Drupal 5.x and earlier did not require the module's major version number. With Drupal 6.x and later, the full branch name (DRUPAL-6--1, DRUPAL-6--2, etc.) is required.

You can also check out only specific areas, such as modules and themes:

Branches such as DRUPAL-4-7, used before the release of Drupal 6.x, will always map to the 1.x branch of the 4.7.x-compatible contributions. All 4.7.x modules will be available from this branch.

Branches such as DRUPAL-4-7--2 will grab any contributions that have 2.x versions of their modules. The contents of these types of branches will probably be limited to few, rather complex modules such as Views or Project module.

It's also possible that further branches will be created, such as DRUPAL-5--3 and so on, but they will likely be very rare. See the full list of available branches in contrib.